CogBlogged from ‘August, 2003’

Gerry Hanely, head MERLOT “wine steward”- said a theme was “connecting learning repositories”. Interesting, eh? Can you think of an acronym that fits there? It begins with an R…. Keynote: “Leading from Both Ends”- Doug MacLeod from Netcetera to talk about eduSourceCanada. Introduced “Donut Object Repositories” Tim Horton’s- a chain of thousands of franchises across Canada.

My decision to send my poster materials to the MERLOT conference by “express” shipping looks shaky. Apparently, my “packages” were held at customs for extra taxes, my office authorizied, and who knows where they are right now. C’est la vie. So for now, my Maricopa Learning eXchange poster is very transparent, or totally virtual. This is no way to run a warehouse ;-) Certainly not the end of the earth. Anyhow, the hotel is brimming with name tagged persons, people glancing at name tags, the usual conference shmoozing etc. Opening reception is up at the 34th floor, and tomorrow the MERLOT flows. Bring it on. There is meta data in the air. Keep on scrolling/clicking to see some photos.

Unlike D’Arcy, my trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, was less than smooth. It rained in Florida, so my flight from Phoenix was late, customs was slow, and the bus stopped at every freaking hotel in downtown. Finally arrived at 2:00 am, cannot h-a-r-d-l-y t-y-p-e (no more than usual). It is blessedly cool here (They call this hot? their high is 15 degrees lower than the Phoenix low. My pool water temperature there is 90F degrees!). But the scenery in Vancouver is stellar. Things will rev up tomorrow for the merlot, MERLOT, MeRlOt, merLOT (that was for Stephen’s MERLOT conference feed, the first of his self-called “hat-trick”- maybe more of a trifecta. Right now the multi-blog aggregator is blitzing Internal Server Error messages (and Stephen is madly debugging??) but it is the most vivid of his triple play posted today. Meanwhile Brian has gone off the deep-end of RSS infatuation and [...]

Although Boris recently blogged on a convoluted way to get RSS feeds from Amazon.com, there is a slicker interface from onfocus , the Amazon RSS Feed Builder. This site is by “pb” or Paul Bausch, “co-developer” of Blogger and author of Amazon Hacks, so definitely no slouch at the programming command line. It is the same princliple, applying an XSLT transformation on the XML data published by Amazon.com. (Now I just have to learn what the heck is XSLT!) For example, here are the top selling books at Amazon.com using the keyword…. (drumroll please) “weblog”. BookWatch (web page view): http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/AmazonRss.asp?search=KeywordSearch&q=weblog&mode=books&sort=%2Bsalesrank RSS: http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=onfocus&dev-t=amznRss&KeywordSearch=weblog&mode=books&bcm=&type=lite&page=1&ct=text/xml&sort=+salesrank&f=http://xml.amazon.com/xsl/xml-rss091.xsl It just might mean it does not really manner how the standards are devised at a particular site if there are public tools like this to transform it to compatible flavors of RSS or whatever else we can dream up to connect content with.

Simply wonderful. RIT professor Liz Lawley is doing some great things by (a) trying; and (b) sharing here efforts in using movabletype as courseware. A version of her Fall 2003 Introduction to Multimedia courseblog is available for peeking (her own mamamusings blog is worth looking at just to see what good work with CSS can render).

Both Stephen and George recently pointed to this bit from Wired News: Educators Turn to Games for Help. What an idea! … wait a minute, we took a look at Shall We Teach with a Game? back in 1994 at that time, with having our faculty review a selection of CD-ROM games for potential in new learning environments. It is good to see that MIT has caught up with our work ;-) But no, we are not crowing for “we did it first credit”, but more to look at the power of small innovations that use existing content rather than big ticket projects that create glitzy, commercial game level apps. We have had some internal discussions in our our organization about a (real? perceived?) notion that our system’s reputation for innovation has lost its luster. So a question is, when people think of innovation, it it only the big money [...]

Just a few days until I leave (Monday), heading northwest to beautiful Vancouver for the MERLOT 2003 conference. In addition to putting on a poster (and a completely unposter-like poster at that!) on the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), I am teaming up with compadres Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman for a session covering our work on RSS and Learning Objects. We were impressed that the conference organizers knew how important this was to put it in the last presentation slot of the conference, and they have assured us that no one ever leaves conferences early. They also enticed us with some beach front property in Barstow. Do not look for any previews or sneak peeks for the presentations, but we have some shifty things up our sleeves. It is possible that Lora or Boris might show up, but you know how faculty like being away on their summer vacations. I’ve [...]